"When the Bush era is done, one of the puzzles left to history will be the seeming ease with which the recklessness and radicalism of the president's fiscal and military endeavors, not to mention his gang’s open contempt for democratic forms, gained the assent of tens of millions of Americans. The news apparatus and the putative opposition party will come in for very large dollops of blame, along with the precipitous decline of public schools over the past generation-plus...The internet demi-monde of right-wing bloggers and chat boards is the purest expression of what has happened to political “dialogue” in the 15-year period bracketed by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and that of the Bush gang. Together the forces of radical conservatism have contrived an extreme makeover in the language of politics: They’ve turned it into the idiot stepchild of sports programming.

What I’m talking about is evident in matters of idiom--the countless times, for example, that “liberal” is invoked as a taunting slur, roughly akin to the way “cheesehead” or “the fucking Yankees” might be tossed off on a sports-chat board. It’s more than a matter of style; there’s a worldview lurking beneath it, and what the worldview entails is summed up in the (semantically challenged) old Vince Lombardi maxim that winning isn’t everything--it’s the only thing. Now of course electoral politics has always been about winners and losers in a very important sense. But has there ever been a political moment so openly defined by swagger and triumphalism for their own sake--the will to humiliate the vanquished, grind them underfoot for the sheer pleasure of showing them who’s boss?...

What’s at stake here is the difference between the moral universe of the citizen and that of the fan, which is to say between that of the participant and the spectator. For the fan, the only crucible that finally matters is being on the winning side."